


Buried Alive

by kishuku



Series: Time Waits for No One [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26011438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kishuku/pseuds/kishuku
Summary: During a mission the team is caught in an earthquake in Dubai that collapses the airport where they are waiting for their transfer.Joe finally opens up and talks about Nicky. Passionate declarations of love are made.The twins are reminded that immortality isn't a blessing.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Time Waits for No One [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1878370
Comments: 9
Kudos: 82





	Buried Alive

Mohammad decided to stay and that meant Avantika would as well.

Mo had always drifted through life, dragged along in his sister’s wake. She’d been the one to take over after their parents had died, just four months part, and she’d been the one to join the Nepalese military first. Mo had always wanted to fix people, be a healer, but money was scarce so when Vanti had suggested joining the military as a medic he’d gone along with it. The twins had risen up in the ranks of the military steadily, Vanti loved being a pilot and Mo had been happy as a medic but he’d always wanted…. More. More knowledge, more skills, more opportunities, perhaps. He didn’t dwell on it, medical school someday, but there was always time.

Now he had more than enough time, but so many other things to learn.

Mo’d stayed because Nile, Booker, and Joe—especially Joe—had more to give him and now he had the time. He felt their desire to do some good in the world, unfettered by borders and laws, the only loyalty to their cause and to each other.

They’d met Quynh. Mo was surprised by the soft spoken handler for the Sweeper, the title the group had granted all of those who’d come after the first, James Copley. The Sweeper erased all of their digital tracks and helped fake any and all necessary documents. In fact, the Sweeper would be faking the twins’ MIA documentation. Allegedly the two had wandered out of their tents during a brief snowstorm in a state of shock and hypothermia to disappear into the surrounding area at the foot of Mount Chomo, missing and presumed dead. The twins had learned that Quynh was a living memory for everything every Sweeper had ever erased or produced and she was the Sweeper’s handler. Being the Sweeper was a lifelong commitment.

Mo mused that it was like adopting a family, but half of them were living and half of them were ghosts. Yet even as they were, the Khatri Chhetri twins had to admit they were incredibly efficient at saving innocents from the depravities of humanity.

Joe became their trainer and instructor.

Initially, that was all the contact the twins had with Joe. He would teach them and practice with them then he would disappear. Vanti once quipped that he was about as emotionally approachable as the moon.

There was always something to practice or learn, hand to hand combat, weapons, guns, languages, politics, social etiquette, culture, security, military, etc. There were a few rescue missions, Mo and Vanti initially acting as backup and support, then it was back to waiting and training.

It was exhausting.

Sometimes Mo felt as though the man was attempting to cram 13,000 years worth of knowledge into his limited skull and it seemed that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, Joe couldn’t do better than them. Mo sat hunched over the kitchen table as his sister attempted to work the knots out of his shoulders and neck. Apparently immortality didn’t bring immediate relief from stiff overworked muscles.

“You’re just lucky you already speak Mandarin,” Nile told them. “Joe and Quynh were absolutely ruthless with me when I had to learn it.”

Mo laughed and Vanti protested, “English is worse! It doesn’t make any sense.” The Nepalese military required higher ranking officers to learn English and Mandarin. The twins had both struggled with their English.

“Nile has no sympathy for us. That was a hell she didn’t have to suffer, unlike the rest of us,” Booker pointed out as he poured himself a drink.

“I would learn English all over again, if it meant I never had to spar with Joe again,” Mo groaned as Vanti dug an elbow into the big muscle along his shoulder. “Dying hurt less than this!”

It had been almost ten years since Mo and his sister had died in the Himalayas, caught in the blizzard of the century. Mo had lost his entire team and Vanti had died attempting to rescue him and the other trapped climbers. Since joining Nile and the others they’d only sustained a few injuries that healed instantly, bullet wounds that might’ve killed them if they’d just been human. Nile said there was no need to test the limits of their immortality, even if the twins were new.

No one was shooting anyone in the head to prove a point.

~~

Mo awoke with a jerk. It was pitch black. It smelled like dust, pulverized stone, and smoke. He tentatively stretched, concrete and the building materials shifting and tumbling as he moved. He was buried in rubble.

Where was he?

Mo coughed, choking on the dust. He tugged the collar of his shirt up over the lower half of his face, hoping it would help him breathe easier.

They—him, Vanti, Nile, Booker, and Joe—had been flying to… India. Border conflicts between India and China had been increasing exponentially in the past decade, both countries claiming the border clashes were the fault of rogue insurgent groups. In truth, both sides were dressing military soldiers in civilian clothes and agitating the other side. The two countries were on the verge of all out war, however neither side wanted to be the first to make a formal declaration of war.

Nile had finally decided they would go to assist evacuating families and delay China’s People’s Liberating Army (PLA) at the border if possible.

They had a transfer in Dubai and the five of them had been in the airport when….

There had been an earthquake.

Suddenly Mo remembered. The fancy, multi-tiered airport tower where hovering aircraft could directly dock at the gate had shivered and rocked like a tree in a storm. Sensors and alarms had sounded as glass fractured. Screams filled the air, competing with the shrieks and thunder-like cracks as the building struggled in vain to stay upright. The entire group of them had collapsed to their knees as the ground bucked and rippled like a living thing underneath them, no one was capable of staying on their feet let alone run. Then the floor had vanished from beneath him. Joe had made a grab for him as they tumbled through the air, his sister’s screams ringing in his ears.

Mo crouched, one arm feeling above his head, not wanting to stand up and knock himself out. The legs of his jeans were stiff, dried blood he deduced. His eyes were open and strained to see anything in the dark.

If he was here what had happened to Vanti? A low level thrum of fear coiled deep down in his gut. He’d been buried in a pocket of air, was she trapped somewhere suffocating on dust and debris filling her lungs? He swallowed back panic. First things first.

“Hello?” he called as he felt around the space. He wasn’t able to fully stand up, but he was able to crouch. Wire scratched and sliced his fingers as he continued moving around.

A hollow metal bong sounded somewhere behind him.

“Hello!” Mo whipped around, feet sliding in the rubble, falling to his knees and started crawling towards the sound.

The person—because it was definitely a person—started to tap out ‘a shave and a haircut’ as Mo crawled. He hit a small opening, the cavern he was in narrowing to a bottleneck that he was forced to squeeze through. Mo scraped his fingers bloody as he grabbed onto whatever he could to pull himself through and his shirt tore as he fell into the next underground section.

“Hello?”

“Here,” a hoarse strained voice whispered.

Mo crawled and groped his way towards the voice, a flailing hand bumped into his shoulder and he jerked back. He felt forward, touching hair matted with blood, a face covered with a beard, shoulders, a hollow metal panel, and a huge chunk of debris.

“Joe?” Mo asked tentatively.

“Move it. Can’t breathe,” the man under him gasped out.

It took nearly another half hour of Mo crawling around, banging his head into a mess of rebar and nearly temporarily blinding himself, not that it matter in the pitch blackness, before he was finally able to push the chunk of debris off his fellow survivor. He could hear the other man gasping as the weight rolled off his chest.

“Fuck, that’s a relief! I’ve been trapped for hours.”

Definitely Joe.

“How are you?” Joe asked.

“I’m okay. I think I was dead—“ Mo started to explain.

“Shh!” Joe’s hand groped around in the darkness and eventually found Mo’s knee where he knelt next to the other man. “There was another survivor in here with me a while ago. I don’t know what happened to him. Fucker refused to help me, crawled off somewhere.”

“Should we go find him?” Mo whispered.

Joe laughed, it was bitter, “Maybe you should go and check it out, but I’ve still got half the building sitting on my legs. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”

“I’ll dig you out!” Mo felt along Joe’s body until his hands encountered the solid block of concrete pining Joe down at his thighs. He pushed, it didn’t budge.

“Yeah, leave that for now. I think you better go find that other guy first or see if he’s found a way out. You could get out and check on the others,” Joe’s disembodied voice told him. “Check on your sister.”

That low level fear attempted to claw its way up his throat from his gut, “Sure, okay. I’ll go check on the other guy.”

The other guy turned out to be curled up in another corner of the small cavern. Mo’s fingers had discovered a wet tacky trail of blood and he’d found the guy dead in a puddle of his own blood. Mo checked for a pulse, breathing, and then as he gently felt over the guy’s body realized he was missing a foot, apparently it’d been sheared off in the collapse and the guy had deliriously crawled around the tiny cavern until he’d bled out.

“He’s dead and there isn’t any way out,” Mo reported back to Joe a little while later. He’d found a few bottles of water, a register, and card reader in his groping. The glass from the display counter dug into his palms as he’d swept his hands around blindly and grasped the rock and twisted metal, making sure he collected as many of the bottles as possible. He gently sucked a piece of glass from the heel of his hand and spat it off to the side. The earth had shivered a few times, raining bits of dust down on him, but thankfully their little pocket of a cave didn’t collapse.

“Well, settle in, kid. We’re going to have to wait for rescue,” Joe informed him.

Mo took a seat next to the concrete slab pining Joe to the floor and leaned back against it. Where was Vanti? Was she okay? Or was she suffocating underneath tons of debris that would’ve killed any normal human? How long were they going to stuck here? Who was going to rescue her if he couldn’t get free? Where was his sister? His mind tread the same thought pattern over and over until it felt as though he’d created grooves in his brain.

He dozed off, the crawling, healing, and constant fear taking its toll. He woke up a few hours later, or he assumed it’d only been hours, hungry, thirsty, and anxious. Was Vanti okay? How long had they been down here?

“Hey, do you want to practice your Russian to take your mind off things?” Joe asked suddenly. It was the most recent language Joe had been teaching the twins. Mo only knew he was there because he could hear the other man shifting around in the rubble.

“Sure,” Mo paused. He switched to Russian, “Are you uncomfortable?”

“ _Da._ I’m lying at a slant and the blood keeps rushing to my head at this angle,” more sounds of Joe moving around on the debris. “And I can’t keep myself propped on my elbows forever. It starts to hurt.”

Wordlessly, Mo crawled over. He leaned his back against the rock he’d shoved off of Joe’s chest, then lifted his teacher’s head and shoulders into his lap. “Better?”

Joe relaxed, allowing the weight of his head to drop onto Mo, “Much.”

The silence stretched, the Russian lesson forgotten, and Mo’s mind turned back to those unanswered questions.

“Aren’t you worried?” Mo asked when he couldn’t handle the worry anymore. He felt Joe twist his head towards the sound of his voice.

“About what?”

“How long do you think it’ll take for them to find us? What if we can’t get you out? What if Booker and Nile and…. They’re buried alive somewhere else?” he choked, suddenly unable to say his sister’s name. He’d heard about Quynh and how long she’d been trapped at the bottom of the ocean.

“If we’re all buried underneath this airport someone will get dug out. The authorities will have to do a search and rescue for survivors. They’ll keep looking for survivors for at least a week, after that authorities will have to remove the dead. We’ll get dug up eventually, either as the living or as the dead. If we get dug up first we’ll start looking for Nile, Booker, and Vanti.” Joe shrugged, “Simple.”

“Have you… Has this happened to you before?” Mo asked.

“Buried alive or an earthquake?” Joe asked.

“Both. Either.”

“I’ve experienced my fair share of earthquakes, but none as bad as this one. The first time I was buried alive was when some religious zealot murdered me with an ax and buried me outside of the city walls,” Joe gave a dry chuckle. “I should’ve killed the bastard.”

“So why didn’t you?” Mo was curious. Joe never struck him as the forgiving type.

Joe paused, “Someone asked me not to.”

Ah. _Someone_ often meant Nicky. One of the three dead demi-immortals.

Andy was the only one they seemed to talk about freely. Nile and Booker telling stories and poking fun at each other about times spent with the mysterious woman. Despite Mo and Vanti’s recent addition, Booker still referred to Nile as ‘the baby’ and insisted on it since that was what Andy had first called her over 300 years ago.

He knew the first of them to die was a man named Lykon. Quynh was the only one who remembered Lykon and she didn’t share. Quynh had lost her two oldest friends and lovers in the world. She wore her grief like a veil, cutting herself off emotionally everyone. Mo had noticed Joe was occasionally able to pierce that veil, but Quynh’s perpetual grief always pushed him back out.

Then the most recent death was Nicky, Joe’s lover for more than a millennia. Nile and Booker only ever mentioned Nicky in whispers and Joe never directly spoke about him. Joe wasn’t done grieving yet.

More than a decade ago Mo—Mohammad Yusuf Khatri Chhetri—had been a medic with the Nepalese army. He’d hoped to go on to pursue medical school, maybe in Europe if his test scores were high enough. All those dreams had died with him when he’d been trapped in a blizzard in the Death Zone, more than 8,000 meters above sea level on the world’s tallest mountain. Nile told the twins that they all remembered their first death. No matter how many more deaths they would experience in their lifetime.

Mo wanted to save lives, not deal death. In between learning French, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili, physical fighting and training, he’d kept up with his medical studies. He’d gotten good at sutures and caring for burns during some of their rescues, some victims they rescued weren’t in very good condition after their ordeals.

Mo was good at fixing the physical body. He wasn’t so sure he could fix Joe’s wounds.

But he wanted to.

“Do you miss him?”Mo asked quietly.

Joe was silent. Mo couldn’t see his face, couldn’t even try to judge what the other man was thinking. So he waited.

Mo was surprised when Joe finally spoke, “I miss him all the time.” It was a whisper, as though he were sharing a terrible secret. The sound of his voice was pure pain, the soft shush of a dusty long dead heart being torn out.

“I’m sorry,” Mo whispered back. “It must be hard.”

After another long moment Joe continued, slow and in that same pain filled whisper, “When you were trapped and died on that mountain did you miss warmth? Did you miss being able to take a breath without it hurting? Even though your teammates were there did you feel more alone than you ever have in your entire life? So alone you thought about dying?”

Mo nodded, the most painful thing about his death at that moment was the thought that he’d failed and left his sister alone. It wasn’t that Vanti wouldn’t be able to take care of herself, he knew she would, but the idea that his absence in the world would be a open wound on her heart. He knew it would be, because if anything happened to Vanti it would be the same for him.

“Yes,” he whispered back.

“Maybe you wanted to die just to end the pain of feeling alone,” Mo heard Joe take a deep breath as he continued slowly. “I miss his voice, his laughter, his touch. I miss falling asleep with him in my arms and waking up with his warm body pressed to mine. I miss his eyes and the touch of his lips. I miss him with an ache that exceeds every bone I’ve ever broken, every injury I’ve ever suffered. I miss his kindness and the gentleness of his soul. I miss him beyond measure and reason. That,” the breath Joe sucked in hitched. “I feel like that every day. Every moment and a thousand times more. So yeah, I miss him.”

Mo hesitated, he was shocked. He didn’t think—

Joe’s shoulders shook softly against him and Mo realized he was crying. So softly he could barely hear it, so he said nothing. Mo hunched over Joe as he cried. Joe twisting his body as far as his trapped legs would allow so he could hide his face in Mo’s shirt. Tears cried in the dark never seemed quite as real.

They stayed like that for what seemed like hours. Mo stayed hunched protectively over the other man until his back ache, until the bottom of his shirt was soaked with tears, until Joe finally fell into an exhausted sleep. It was only then that Mo leaned back, eyes blankly staring up towards the sky he couldn’t see.

He wondered if this was the first time Joe had confessed how truly broken his heart was.

~~

They shared a few sips of water from one of the bottles when Joe woke up. Mo wanted him to drink more, he had to be dehydrated after the storm of crying, but Joe had just turned his head away when Mo insisted. Mo set the bottle back down and crawled over to his spot where he could support Joe’s head.

But after a few minutes Mo asked, “Why do you think Vanti and I were chosen?”

He felt Joe shake his head, “We don’t know why any of us are chosen. Nile used to ask that question all the time, drove Andy nuts.” Joe paused, weighing his words before he finally said, “ _He_ always said the _why_ didn’t matter, what was important was that we should fight for what we believe is right.”

“He…. He sounds…. Tell me about him,” Mo asked gently.

Joe started hesitantly. He described Nicky first in loving detail. Mo vaguely knew what the man had looked like, he’d accidentally seen one of Joe’s notepads when he’d been sketching late at night. The anguished expression on Joe’s face when he’d looked up at Mo was enough to tell him who the person in the drawing was. Mo had fled as quietly and quickly as possible, knowing he’d stumbled on Joe in a moment where the man had been as raw as an exposed nerve.

Then Joe was telling him about the time they’d crossed the ocean to fight in the American Civil War when it had just been Andy, Joe, Nicky, and a newly minted Booker. He’d still been Sebastien back in 1861. Joe told Mo how they’d pretended Joe was Greek, but it wasn’t enough to stop some bounty hunters who’d kidnapped him and attempted to sell him south. Then it was Nicky and Andy’s turn to pretend to be his owners in order to demand his return. Booker had forged the ownership papers for them and Joe laughed as he recalled Andy stomping up to the magistrate at the court house wearing a borrowed corset, bonnet, and voluminous dress.

“I wasn’t certain if she was angrier about my kidnapping or the dress,” Joe chuckled.

Afterwards, Booker forged Joe a set of ‘freedom papers’ just in case. Nicky reassured him it wouldn’t happen again as he’d slaughtered every bounty hunter in the vicinity. Joe kissed him for that and Booker and Andy, laughingly, had fled the tent.

Mo learned Joe got seasick when he bemoaned how much sailing they’d done back in the day. First to France to find Booker during the Napoleonic Wars from Egypt, to San Paolo to fight in the Independence of Brazil and the Ragamuffin War, back to Europe where they’d bounced from conflict to conflict, next to America to fight the Civil War, and then back to Europe.

It was as though a dam had opened up inside the man. Joe told stories, laughed, and sometimes cried as he talked about Nicky. His soft voice painting elaborate stories of the past, coloring cultures and countries that had faded into history. There was a surreal quality to the stories, as though Mo were listening to fantastical fairy tales in the dark.

Joe told Mo how Nicky had secretly kept track of his family over the years, despite Andy’s warnings. When bubonic plague had broken out in Genoa towards the end of 1347 Nicky demanded that they go help, insisting they were good for something other than fighting and killing. Andy had finally relented, but it’d all been too late for Nicky’s family. Every blood relation he had left on this world perished in the grip of the Black Death.

Although they had been in the right place at the right time to protect the Jewish minority living in the ghettos. It seemed all over Europe rumors were spreading about Jewish immunity to the Black Death because of their secret pacts with Satan. Andy, Quynh, Joe, and Nicky had gone door to door trying to convince Jewish families to flee and hide. Most had refused to leave believing their neighbors wouldn’t barricade them inside their own homes and set the buildings alight. Some had left with Andy and Quynh, sneaking out of the city in the dead of the night. Joe and Nicky had stayed behind in attempt to save other survivors of the massacre.

“Nicky convinced Andy that a sharp blade wasn’t the answer to every problem,” Joe murmured.

The stories were endless. Day after day and Joe never repeated himself. Their water supply dwindled and the rocks above them remained silent.

“What was his original name?” Mo asked out of curiosity between stories.

“Nicolo di Genoa,” Joe paused again, rolling a memory or thought through his mind before speaking. “That’s where I scattered his ashes. In Genova, Italy.”

“Oh.”

“I also insisted that our Sweeper issue him a death certificate,” Mo heard the smile in Joe’s voice. “I asked that it read: ‘Nicolo al Kaysani’. I hope he forgives me for my little vanity.”

“I think that’s a very romantic gesture,” Mo reassured him.

“Yeah, Nicky used to call me an incurable romantic. I was, but only for him,” Joe stopped talking.

The two sat in a companionable silence. Mo had to admit the stories about Joe and Nicky’s past together were a good distraction from the constant worry chewing on his guts about the others, but in the silence the questions and uneasiness slowly crept back inside him. How long had they been trapped down here?

“Do you want to know how he died?” Joe’s voice suddenly asked out of the dark.

Mo gently sucked in a breath. “If you would to share it with me, I would be honored,” Mo said realizing of all the stories Joe had told this was the one he’d avoided.

“It was sudden and it was senseless,” a hint of anger tinged Joe’s voice.

“We were in the Himalayas, the Tibet side, and we were searching for a group of human trafficking victims who’d been abandoned on the mountain by the traffickers. We found them and were trying to climb back to the Nepalese side, because continuing into China wasn’t really an option. Tibet is too heavily militarized by PLA for us to smuggle that many women and children in without being noticed, not to mention, the four of us stuck out,” Joe shifted, restlessly adjusting his shoulders in Mo’s lap. “If Quynh had gone with us, she was the only who would’ve… but she doesn’t go on missions anymore.”

Another question Mo wanted an answer to, but that was another story for another time.

“It was a very narrow ridge. Nicky was bringing up the rear and he’d just helped a woman carrying a child to cross, then he looked up at me and…” Tears choked Joe’s voice, “The edge crumbled and he just vanished.”

Mo stroked his hand over Joe’s hair, the curls dusty, unwashed, and a little stiff with dried blood.

“I can still see him. He just looked so surprised when he fell,” Joe took a few breaths before he could continue. “Nile and Booker convinced me to help them get the group of women and children off the mountain before going to search for Nicky. If Booker hadn’t held me back, I probably would’ve just jumped after Nicky,” he gave a little humorless laugh. “It certainly would’ve been faster.”

“How long did it take you to find him?”

“Almost two months. As soon as I could I ditched the other two and headed back up into the mountains. When I found him Nicky was…. He was gone. He’d left this broken shell of a body behind,” Joe stopped. “And he’d left me.”

Mo shivered. He couldn’t help it, his mind drifted to his sister. Someday this was the fate him and Vanti would also suffer, one of them left behind by the other. An incomplete half of what should’ve been a whole. They’d come into the world only minutes apart, Vanti was older than him by 7 minutes, yet with this immortality one of them could be alone for years. Decades. Centuries.

“I carried Nicky back over the mountains with me. I couldn’t leave him there. He’d died on that mountain, alone,” Joe sounded far away and the grief was back in his voice, the grief that had temporarily left him while he’d been telling stories. “I don’t remember much after finding Nile and Booker again on the Nepalese side.”

Mo knew a little about what had happened after Joe staggered into their hideout with Nicky’s corpse. Booker had told him and Vanti one night when he’d been further into his cups than usual. Nicky was suddenly dead. Joe had been catatonic for months. Nile had been panicked and grief-stricken. It was one of the few times Booker had risen to the challenge and taken care of everything, contacting Quynh with the news.

Joe fell silent after that.

“I’m sorry,” Mo whispered again.

“Nile and Booker try. I know they do. They’ve both been trying so hard for the last two centuries. They know I’m grieving, still grieving,” Joe said. “But it’s like missing a limb. You can’t comfort a missing arm or leg. Nicky took my heart with him when he tumbled off that cliff and he will keep it.”

Mo nodded, even though he knew Joe couldn’t see it. “When do you think you’ll—“

“Die?” Joe finished for him. “I don’t know. When it’s our time, it’s time. We thought Andy lost her immortality because she’d lost the will to live or to fight before we found Nile,” he sighed. “But I know that’s not true. After Nicky… I didn’t have the will to live. The only thing I wanted to do was die, but my immortality has remained.”

“The first time I ever saw you, I saw you in a dream. Do you ever dream about him?” Mo asked.

Joe shook his head, Mo felt the motion against his legs. “No. Never,” he hesitated. “It’s why I draw. I’m afraid of forgetting what my Nicolo looks like. Maybe if I dreamt about him…” he trailed off absently. “No. If I dreamt about Nicolo, I don’t think I could accept his death. I would search for eternity. I couldn’t stay here.”

“But you’re here. You’re training us. Did you change your mind?” Mo asked.

Joe’s head shifted, not really a nod. “Yes. No. After I realized no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to die, I was angry. I don’t know who I was angry at, maybe everyone, the whole damn world. I was angry that Nicky was dead. I was angry that he’d abandoned me. I was angry at myself for not being able to die. I was angry at whatever sick God had given us a millennia together, but then separated us.

“But Nicky always said: We fight for what we believe is right. He truly believed that.”

It was also what Mo and Vanti’s father had always told them, that Khatri Chhetri warriors must have a brave heart and fight for what they believed was right. It made him wonder if Nicky had ever met a Khatri Chhetri warrior during his lifetime.

Joe went on, “So I made a promise. I swore I would keep fighting for what I believed was right. I would do it for Nicolo and I hope…” his voice cracked slightly, he cleared his throat and started again. “I hope that whatever gave us these 1,000 years together will give me back to him when my time finally comes.”

~~

The water had run out and they could really smell the dead guy sealed inside their tomb with them by now. Mo tried not to think about how awful he smelled, but each time he moved around and then returned to support Joe’s head and shoulders his teacher never said anything about it.

Then the ground above them shook and shivered as though going through another quake. Dust and rocks pelted down from above. Mo hunched over Joe’s head and covered the back of his own with both hands.

After several long minutes it stopped.

“Earthquake or digging?” Joe croaked out from between parched lips.

“I don’t know.”

Mo felt Joe shifting his weight then he heard Joe drumming out ‘shave and a haircut’ on the metal panel. It was the same technique he’d used to alert Mo to his location just days ago. Joe tapped out the sequence half a dozen times then he paused.

Somewhere above them someone else tapped back the same rhythm.

“Fuck yeah,” Joe whispered as he continued beating out the same rhythm.

Mo was grinning, he could feel the skin split on his lips as he smiled, unable to stop. “Fuck yeah,” he echoed.

They waited eagerly in the dark until the world suddenly collapsed. Mo heard Joe scream, voice dry from disuse, but it was a genuine scream of pain. Mo wasn’t able to do much more than hold the front of his shirt over his mouth and nose as the air filled with dust and light pierced the darkness and into his eyes.

Hands were grabbing him, Mo tried to hold onto Joe as he was pulled away with a cry. The light was too bright, even with his eyes closed it stabbed into his brain through his eyelids, he slung an arm over his arms to shield himself. Someone poured water over his lower face, he opened his mouth and licked water droplets from his lips.

There was light everywhere, but he was still as blind as he had been underground. He was placed on a stretcher and someone grabbed his hand, “Mo!”

 _Vanti_ , he tried to say, but coughed, dust turning into mud inside his mouth and throat. An oxygen mask was clapped over his face and he stopped trying to talk, but he squeezed his sister’s hand tight enough he was certain the bones in her hand ground over each other. Her grip was equally tight.

The fear that had lived in Mo’s gut for days finally relaxed and he felt light-headed with relief. They were safe. They were together again.

He was lifted into something, an ambulance he guessed. A few minutes later another stretcher thudded and squeaked in beside him. _Joe, please let it be Joe._

The doors slammed shut and they started moving, sirens wailing overhead.

“Here, put these on,” someone slipped sunglasses over his eyes and Mo clawed the plastic mask from his face as he sat up. He opened his eyes, he still had to squint but at least the light wasn’t stabbing its way into his brain anymore.

“Vanti,” he whispered and reached out to hug his sister. She was wearing a black and dark gray hijab and loose top over dark jeans. Vanti was also covered head to toe in dust, her eyes shining with tears. She clutched at him, his ribs protested.

It felt amazing to hold her against him, her arms around his neck, her tears on his neck as she sniffled into the disgustingly vile remains of his shirt. They fit against each other like two puzzle pieces, like the way they’d been pressed against each other in utero for months, limbs tangled together, sharing everything. Mo also had a light wetness to the edge of his lashes as he attempted to banish every ‘what if’ he’d had while trapped in the dark. When Vanti finally released him, she stared at him, as though to convince herself he was real. She perched precariously on the edge of the stretcher, pressing herself up against him without actually being in his lap.

“How long?” Mo asked.

“Twenty days,” the other person in the back said.

A woman wearing a dark niqab sat next to the stretcher where, yes, Joe was. The niqab covered the lower half of her face, dark kohl lined eyes were all that were visible above it, and a full scarf was draped over her head and shoulders. Nile pulled down the face scarf, “I am so ready to get the hell out of this thing.”

Joe struggled up onto an elbow and smiled at Nile from behind his own sunglasses, “The eyeliner looks good, Nile.”

She gave a quiet snort but smiled indulgently at Joe. “We need to go.”

“What about Booker?” Mo asked.

“Who do you think is driving this thing?” the driver flicked off the wailing sirens. The Frenchman waved at them without turning around, keeping his eyes on the road. “There’s a public bathhouse where we can get you two a change of clothing before we head to Bahrain.”

“Bahrain?” Joe asked.

Mo glanced over at Joe’s legs. Of course, they were healed but his pants were a dark rusty brown, absolutely soaked in dry blood and torn everywhere. Any other man would’ve died down there or at least would’ve lost both his legs. He would later learn that heavy machinery had toppled the wall sitting on Joe’s legs and Joe had screamed because as he put it: ‘the worst case of pins and fucking needles in my life.’

“There’s an American military base there. The Sweeper can hack the records and get us out on a flight to Germany. We can rendezvous with Quynh and the Sweeper after getting back into Europe,” Nile explained.

“What about the conflict between India and China?”

“It’s over,” Nile’s mouth had a bitter twist to it. “Both sides claimed the conflicts were due to insurgents, arrested a few so-called domestic terrorists and publically executed a total of 73 men as a show of good faith.”

“Now what? They’re just going to go back to playing chicken with each other?” Joe asked.

Nile offered a one shouldered shrug, “Not our problem anymore.”

“Isn’t that a tad harsh?” Vanti demanded, Mo’s hand was still gripped in hers, his other arm slung around her shoulders.

“We can’t fight every conflict in the world,” Joe defended Nile.

Mo squeezed Vanti’s hand. The twins exchanged a long look, unspoken communication and understanding flickering between them. Mo sympathized with his sister’s desire to rush into conflict to defend those who couldn’t fend for themselves, he understood it, he’d wanted to rescue every stray cat and dog he’d found as a child. He’d learned as child that it simply wasn’t possible to save everyone. Vanti finally dropped her gaze to their hands, her eyes flickering briefly over the blood stains in his clothing.

“We can’t eliminate armies or topple governments. At the end of the day we’re still human,” Mo reminded her.

“Fine, but I don’t have to like it,” she muttered.

~~

Nile waited until Joe was showered and changed. She scooted down to the end of their table in the public dining area of the bathhouse, leaving Vanti and Booker at the other end. She waved Joe towards the seat across from her.

“You seem…. Better,” she commented and pushed a cold minty tea drink across to the table to him.

“Being clean helps,” Joe reached for the basket of cold fries. “Hot food would help even more.”

“No, I meant your mental state. You seem more clear headed, more _here_ ,” Nile tried to explain. “You seem more like the old you, the Joe I met when I was new.”

Joe smiled, “You’re still new Nile. Maybe you’ve lost a little bit of shine, but you’re still a bright penny to me.”

“Don’t you mean when compared to you?” she smiled back. “So what happened down there?”

Joe finished the tea, when he lowered the cup the smile had left his face and his eyes following the cup as he set it on the table. “I told him about Nicky.”

Nile’s eyebrows rose fractionally, but she held her tongue.

He sighed, “I told him a lot. Even how Nicky….” Joe fiddled with the cup, rolling it back and forth between his hands. “It was easy. Mo’s never met Nicky, so I can…. I can build an image for him, show him how I see Nicolo. I don’t know why that matters to me, but knowing he’s hearing these stories for the first time….” Joe shrugged.

Nile reached across the table and wrapped her hands around Joe’s, which were still around the cup, “Hey, I’m just glad you’re doing better. That you’re more you.” She gave his hands a squeeze, “I don’t want to push you, Joe, but I just want you to know that…. you’re not alone.”

He nodded, refusing to meet her eyes.

~~

“Hey,” Vanti found Mo sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Bahrain. They had a few days to wait until the next flight to Berlin.

He smiled and waved to the empty seat next to him.

“You’ve been quiet,” Vanti observed.

Mo nodded, “Been thinking about some things.”

She reached for his hand, covering it with hers. “About what?”

“Mom and Dad. Us. The future,” Mo murmured, staring out over the city nightscape.

“Did you have a near death experience? Pondering the meaning of life?” Vanti asked teasingly.

Mo smiled, “Sort of.” He gave his sister’s hand a squeeze. “Do you ever think about what it would be like to be alone?” Vanti jolted, her arm jerking as though to pull away. Mo gripped her hand tighter.

“No. Why? Do you want to be alone?” she demanded.

Mo shook his head, “I think it’s terrifying. I always thought it was unimaginable, but after that…. I think I can imagine how unbearable it will be.”

“Could be,” she insisted.

“No, Vanti. It _will_ be. For one of us,” Mo shifted his grip until he could lace their fingers together. “One of us will have to go through it.”

“We found our immortality together, maybe—“

“Nicky and Joe did too,” Mo interrupted softly.

The horror of it trickled through her, “I’m not sure I’d survive without you, Mohammad.”

His smile was bitter, “We won’t get to have that choice.”

They sat together, each lost in their own thoughts. Mo considered the delusion of power their immortality gave each of them, but in reality they were powerless. They were puppets in a game where they didn’t even know the rules to.

“Mohammad, we’re Khatri Chhetri. It means we’re warriors,” Avantika said after a moment. “A warrior’s heart may feel fear, but we don’t let it control us. This,” she waved her free hand around her head as though to encompass the night sky. “It doesn’t control us either. We all make our own choices with the time we have and I choose to be Khatri Chhetri.”

Mo smiled. Vanti was right, even without each other they would always be Khatri Chhetri and that bond had stretched through generations.

“If you keep your warrior’s heart know that I’ll always be there,” Vanti promised. “And I will always keep you in mine.”


End file.
